Instead, in my installation Nothing is Missing, I attempted to achieve the opposite goal: a very personal interaction between interviewer and interviewee, which I wished to make coincide with that between the speaker and the viewer. Let’s face it: this is (epistemically) false and (ethically) wrong.
I have always found this a false modesty, insincere, and the resulting image seemed to be turning the interviewee into an animal in the zoo objectified, instead of a participant in a dialogue with the viewer. The point is that the “subject” is the person represented.
Thus, the invisible interviewer is indicated but not seen. This is a rule so strong that it is often the first critical remark I get when showing my films. One example makes this clear: in documentary, it is crucial that the interviewee does not look into the camera but slightly to the side. Like the other arts, cinema also has its rules, even if, as an intermedial art form, producing multi-modal texts, it must by definition stay away from the “medium essentialism” that has plagued the study of art for so long now. Nevertheless, rejecting the idea of making an “adaptation”, we flaunted our indifference to “faithfulness” – to personality traits of characters, even their age similarity of events, and other elements usually considered in terms of faithfulness. Retrospectively, in the endorsement of mistakes – different, of course, since our medial position was different – we realised we were being loyalto Flaubert’s novel, in a specific sense: loyal to its aesthetical and political positions. Hence, I participate myself in this inquiry.Īs it happens, without being aware of this as an artistic issue, Michelle Williams Gamaker and I, when making Madame B (2013), have also made wilful mistakes, initially simply because they occurred, and we liked the effect, began to see the meaning that emerged from them, and thus the idea of examining mistakes more in general and in depth, began to dawn on me. Inevitably, in artistic research, the researcher, when an academic, also participates as an artist. Without endorsing the formal issues of diplomas, I have been involved in this, from the moment I realised the surplus value of making art as a form of analysing cultural issues. Attempts to bring academic analysis closer to artistic practice have been around for decades, but it remains somewhat problematic to avoid hierarchical thinking, which is unfortunately stimulated by the requirement that artists, if they wish to be teachers in art schools, earn a PhD. This inquiry is part of what is now commonly called “artistic research” – research of which the working method or mode is doing, making, that about which one has questions. Instead, I hope to make the case for the intertwinement of formal aspects such as the mistakes in question, and their political and aesthetic effects. Nor is the discussion limited to formal issues. Thus, an intermediality emerges that is not a one-sided adaptation of one work into another, nor a translation of one artistic language into another, but a dynamic I would propose to call an intermedial conversation. Moving between literature, painting and film, I will examine if and how such effective mistakes can find their equivalents in other media without translating them and thereby distorting what each medium allows. In a triangular conversation, I will analyse some of such mistakes that seem typical within the use of the medium of each. For, there is more to this artistic behaviour than a self-reflexive attention to their own medium.
The meaning of mistakes goes farther, become more complex, when we consider relations of difference between media. Below I will call on modernist painter Edvard Much to argue he also made such wilful mistakes. But other artists, including great ones, working in different media, did similar things. This is especially remarkable in the case of such a meticulous word artist. I will argue below that he wilfully made mistakes in order to shake up the automatism with which readers presuppose transparency in their routine use of language. He was unorthodox in his grammatical uses of verb tenses, the refusal of a plausible proportion of direct discourse, and the deployment of incongruous comparisons. One of the most perfectionist literary writers, Gustave Flaubert, made “mistakes”. Draft article submitted for discussion to the conference Imperfection organized by Ellen Rutten, March 11-12, and for a seminar on intermedialities, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden, on February 20 2019.
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